Scammers, be they using telephones, the internet, or any other media, deserve whatever trouble the honest citizenry can cause them.

Telephone scamming, of course, is nothing new. My father, who was born when long-distance communication was by letter or telegram, stubbornly refused to ever have anything to do with mobile phones or the new-fangled internet. He and my Mom got along with a landline phone, as they always had, and one day he answered the phone to find a young woman’s voice on the other end. “Grandpa,” the voice said, “I’m in trouble. I need five thousand dollars, or they’re going to put me in jail.”

“What’s your name?” the Old Man replied.

“Don’t you recognize my voice?” the young woman replied. Dad hung up.

These days, phone scams are a little more sophisticated, with banks of computers robocalling thousands of numbers at a go. But a fellow named Roger Anderson is turning the tables on them.

After a telemarketer swore at his son nearly 10 years ago, Roger Anderson set out to cause robocallers, telephone fraudsters and scammers as many problems as possible.

His solution was to create an artificial intelligence call-deflection system that puts incoming spam calls on the line with a ChatGPT-powered personality, keeping fraudsters talking in circles as they attempt to extract financial information from a chatbot.

“This is really an incredibly silly idea,” Anderson, who founded the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, told Fox News. “But in a way, I think it’s the only way to combat unsolicited telemarketing because we just can’t seem to get a track on stopping all of these unwanted calls.”

I am utterly in favor of giving robocallers and would-be scammers all the grief they can handle, and Mr. Anderson’s tech does that in spades:

“These robots, now thanks to ChatGPT, they tuned their conversation to the context of the call,” Anderson said. “So if a scammer is talking about debt consolidation, the robots will talk about how much debt they have and tease them a little bit.”

“If the scammer wants to talk about Medicare fraud, then the robots will talk about Medicare and keep them going,” he continued.

This is sophisticated stuff. The best I ever came up with, back in the days of landlines and telemarketers, was when receiving a telemarketer call, to hand the phone to a convenient two-year-old and say, “Here, talk to the nice man.”

As much fun as it is to see scammers getting their comeuppance, the issue remains a serious problem:

Unwanted robocalls are the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) top complaint from Americans, who receive about 4 billion robocalls per month, the agency reported in August. Nearly $40 billion was lost to phone scams in America from May 2021 to May 2022, according to research last year from caller-ID company Truecaller.

The telecom fraud picture is much bigger than this. During the COVID issue, Chinese scammers stole millions in COVID cash. We’re lucky to not get too many up here; from our own experience and from talking with folks around the area, phone scammers don’t seem to bother with Great Land phone numbers very much, maybe because of our low population, or maybe it’s just our own perception — who knows? Hard numbers aren’t available. But fraud attempts are a global issue, whether they be robocalls or Nigerian princes emailing you for help moving money out of their country. So it’s great to see people fighting back, and Roger Anderson isn’t the only one. For hours of entertainment, check out the YouTube channel Scammer Payback. (Language alert!) The young man behind that channel has managed to actually get scammers jailed. His efforts, like Mr. Anderson’s, should be applauded.